An alternate definition of “working”
A few weeks ago, I thought I had the beta version of Windows 7 working on my iMac, using Boot Camp to boot directly into Windows. Turns out, I almost had it working. It was installed, I could log in and access programs, but it would lock up randomly, anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour after logging in. That mean it was pretty unusable. So I’ve spent the past 2 weeks trying to get it to truly work, because for the purposes I use the iMac for, Windows is really better suited than Mac OS X.
After 2 weeks, and many, many, many, many installs, updates, hard drive formats, and re-installs, I finally have the newest Release Candidate for Windows 7 “working” on my iMac. When I say it’s working, I mean:
- upon finishing setup, the system just showed an error message, instead of the “Welcome to Windows” screen. Found that fix online, disabled the video driver, got into Windows.
- Once in Windows, sound didn’t work
- Installed Apple’s Boot Camp drivers for Windows. This fixed the sound problem, sort of fixed the video driver, broke the Bluetooth connections. Now my wireless keyboard doesn’t work.
- Updated the Boot Camp drivers to the most recent version (2.1, from 2008) that I can get from Apple. Video pretty good. Sounds still works, Bluetooth still doesn’t.
- Dug out the little Bluetooth adapter that came with my wireless keyboard. Seems pointless, because Bluetooth is built into the iMac. But at least my keyboard works now.
- Hey look, NVidia has released official Windows 7 drivers! Installing them means Windows doesn’t boot anymore. That wasn’t fun to fix. Guess I’m sticking with the Boot Camp video drivers.
- Boot Camp video drivers means that playing a video in iTunes, or Windows Media Center, crashes the computer.
- Had to take out the 4GB of memory that was installed, and replace it with 2GB of memory to stop the random lockups. This still didn’t make the 64-bit version of Win7 work, so I have to run the 32-bit version.
But as long as I don’t do anything to make it angry, Windows “works” on the iMac!